Nature Brushes Humanity Aside

September 03, 1992|By William F. Woo.

It began, as North Atlantic hurricanes do, as a wave or ripple of air blowing westward across Africa. Drawing upon the warm dry air over the Sahara, the wave moved unescorted by clouds, and so there was nothing to see and record by the monitors, watching electronically from the edges of space. Toward the middle of the month, the wave crossed the African coast and was pushed westward over the Atlantic by the northeast trade winds.

Somewhere north of the doldrums, that equatorial trough of nearly dead air which gives us a synonym for listlessness, the wave chanced upon another, a ripple that had come from the same direction and over much the same place. They converged at a narrow angle.

So the winds began to move against each other and moist heat rose from the surface of the water, which was almost as warm as the air, and the turning of the Earth made this engine work more efficiently. And thus it happened that at 2300 Greenwich Time on Aug. 16, the European weather satellite Meteosat, from 23,000 miles overhead, detected a telltale pattern of clouds, revealing that a tropical depression had formed.

The location was Latitude 12.4 North, Longitude 40.9 West, a spot on the face of the Earth about 1,500 miles east of Venezuela. By now the wind was blowing counterclockwise at more than 35 m.p.h. and waves of perhaps 10 feet, whipped by rain, were crashing across the surface.

A small closed-system storm was born. The telemetry from Meteosat was relayed to the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Fla.

Overnight, this mechanism of clouds, swirling winds and water progressed a few hundred miles northeast. Its winds had picked up, surpassing 39 m.p.h. An eye had formed. The system was now ready for a name, and in Coral Gables it was officially designated Andrew, signifying that it was the first tropical storm of 1992. It was a little more than 1,100 miles east of the Lesser Antilles, traveling west-northwest at 21 m.p.h.

By the following day, Andrew had moved into the watching area of an American weather satellite called GOES, for Geostationary Orbital

Environmental Satellite, parked 22,300 miles above the equator, west of the Galapagos. One of its first portraits of Andrew shows the storm just coming around the eastern curvature of the planet. At this point, Andrew`s clouds covered an area of perhaps 250 by 300 miles.

A mature hurricane can demonstrate remarkable staying power. The great hurricane of September 1900 that devastated Galveston, Texas, killing 6,000 people, curved back eastward across the Atlantic and Europe and was still recognizable as a storm as it blew out over Siberia. Even so, the machinery of a tropical storm can be exceedingly delicate. Minute changes in pressure, a sudden appearance of competing winds, can snuff it out, and for the first days of its life Andrew came close to disintegration.

The storm took five days to develop its full stature. Approaching behind a broad band of high fleecy cirrus clouds, followed by rain, Andrew moved behind a towering wall of dense gray cumulonimbus clouds. It could now be called by the name of Hurakan, the one-legged Mayan god of lightning by whose identity we know these ferocious combinations of wind and internal air pressure and surge of ocean.

The hurricane tore across the Bahamas a week ago Sunday and came ashore the next day just south of Miami, with sustained winds of more than 140 m.p.h. Racing across Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, Andrew turned north into the Louisiana coast. Its gusts now measured 160 m.p.h.

The storms that blow across the seas, some disintegrating, others like Andrew maturing into systems of destruction many magnitudes beyond anything humans have produced, bear names that are incongruously common place: Andrew, Betsy, Camille, Hugo. But it is the patronymic of all these great North Atlantic storms, Hurakan, a powerful old god from a lost religion, that touches something deeper in the human race.

For modern and sophisticated as our lives and civilization may be, there still beats a primitive and savage chamber in each of our hearts. It quickens in the presence of nature`s prodigies, of powers beyond all control of humanity, of size and sound and forces that dwarf our most impressive creations and that remind us once again of our insignificant places in a vast system for which religions were invented to provide comfort and understanding. Mana-the supernatural, impersonal power of nature-existed for early people in the rage of the bull, the ferocity of the lion. People today still find it, in the quiver of the spirit produced by the lives of great storms like Andrew.

By Wednesday of last week Andrew was no longer a hurricane. By Thursday it was only a mass of rain, moving northeast. As it turned, its broad shoulders touched a wide area.

Last Thursday morning in St. Louis, a rain of tropical origin fell, steady, soaking, arriving without thunder. Going to work, my wife and I passed through a trace of Andrew. Briefly, we were a part of Africa, the deep Atlantic and everlasting powers that transcend the memory of all men and women.